Come Wednesday, someone will be out an awful lot of money with awfully little to show for it.

State Controller Steve Westly has put $35.2 million of his own money into his campaign for the Democratic gubernatorial nomination. State Treasurer Phil Angelides has anted up only about $1.5 million for his campaign — still not chump change for most Californians — while his friend, Sacramento developer Angelo Tsakopoulos, has spent $8.7 million for ads on his behalf.

And when this week’s dust clears, either Westly or Angelides will be left to serve out the rest of his current term and then leave public life, at least temporarily. As controller and treasurer, these are California’s money men; staking so much money out-of-pocket begs the question of whether they’re smart investors. Neither holds the state’s self-funding record. That belongs to businessman Al Checchi, who spent $40 million in 1998’s Democratic gubernatorial primary — in the end, more than $53 for each of his 748,828 votes — yet got only about a third as many votes as Gray Davis.

Does Checchi have any regrets?

“I’d like the money back,” he quipped with a laugh, “but I’m not ashamed of it.”

“In my particular case, I spent my own money and I would not take a campaign contribution,” he noted. “The money was put towards trying to get an argument across in an environment where there was very little free media.

“I’m certainly not ashamed of spending my own money on my own candidacy in a state of 34 million people, to try to reach them when I had not been a candidate before. I had not benefited from the name recognition or whatever knowledge people have of someone who’s held public office.”

For the record, Garry South — who ran Davis’ 1998 campaign and now advises Westly’s — has been quoted as saying voters don’t object to self-funded candidates, only to self-funded candidates with no political experience. Westly is accepting campaign contributions atop his personal spending.

Checchi said his biggest disappointment in 1998 was “how little free media there was. It’s free media — people writing — that can get across something more than 30-second commercials. The opportunity to engage voters intellectually cannot be done on television.”

He said he had 10 researchers helping him develop policy for 18 months before he even entered the 1998 race, yet he never got much chance to talk policy. “Unless the print media are very, very active and willing to devote a decent amount of space… to really evaluating the qualifications of people, then you can understand why the candidates end up doing what they’re doing.”

What they’re doing, this year just as in many years, is avoiding the fact that there is little substantive difference between many of their policies, Checchi said.

“They’re both Democrats and they both, if elected, would do about the same thing,” he said. “They’re both decent guys, they’re both ethical guys, and this is what campaigns have become… You get stuck in a pit in this campaign and you sit there and start attacking each other. What else can you do?”

Los Gatos Republican Steve Poizner, a Silicon Valley entrepreneur, spent about $5.75 million of his own money seeking the 21st Assembly District seat in 2004, losing to Redwood City Democrat Ira Ruskin by about 3 percentage points; his 92,118 votes cost him more than $62 each.

“The Assembly race was testimony to why we need redistricting reform in California,” said Wayne Johnson, consultant to Poizner’s current campaign for state Insurance Commissioner. “Despite having enough resources to tell your message, you could not overcome the partisan registration advantage.”

The 21st Assembly district in late 2004 was about 45 percent Democratic to about 31 percent Republican; Johnson noted Poizner attracted many crossover Democrats and did far better than the rest of that election’s GOP ticket, topped by President Bush’s re-election bid.

Perhaps that need for redistricting explained Poizner’s passion for 2005’s Proposition 77, the reapportionment reform measure of which Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger put him in charge. He spent $2.25 million of his own money on that campaign, which failed.

Now Poizner, unopposed in Tuesday’s Republican primary, already has put

$4.2 million into his campaign for Insurance Commissioner; he is expected to face Democrat Lt. Gov. Cruz Bustamante in November.

Johnson noted Bustamante has taken campaign contributions from the deep-pocketed insurance industry he wants to regulate, so Poizner’s self-funding simply levels the playing field. Otherwise, Johnson said, “he wouldn’t be able to compete… We’ve seen the amount of money that can come in when a regulated industry chooses to weigh in.”

Bustamante — who has said he’ll take contributions from any supporter but feel beholden to none — had $338,330 in his Cruz 2006 campaign account as of May 20; Poizner’s campaign had about $2.6 million as of the same date.

Perhaps California’s most nationally renowned self-funder was oil heir and then-Rep. Michael Huffington, R-Calif., who spent about $27.5 million of his own money in his 1994 bid for the U.S. Senate. His $30 million campaign — including more than three times the previous record for television ad buys — was the costliest in U.S. Senate history until New Jersey Democrat Jon Corzine spent $62.7 million of his own money in 2000.

Corzine won; he is now New Jersey’s governor. Huffington lost in 1994 by just 1.6 percent to incumbent Democrat Dianne Feinstein; each of his 3,811,501 votes had cost him more than $7. Huffington couldn’t be reached for comment for this story.

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